——-school-friendships are not always found, Though fair in promise, permanent and sound; The most disinterested and virtuous minds, In early years connected, time unbinds; New situations give a different cast Of habit, inclination, temper, taste; And he that seem'd our counterpart at first, Soon shews the strong similitude reversed. Young heads are giddy, and young hearts are warm, And make mistakes for manhood to reform. Boys are, at best, but pretty buds unblown, Whose scent and hues are rather guessed than known; Each dreams that each is just what he appears, But learns his error in maturer years, When disposition, like a sail unfurled, Shews all its rents and patches to the world. Disposition however is the one thing which undergoes no other change than that of growth in after life. The physical constitution, when any morbid principle is innate in it, rarely alters; the moral constitution—(except by a miracle of God's mercy,) never. ἀνθρώποις δ᾽ ἀεὶ Ὁ μὲν πονηρὸς, οὐδὲν ἄλλο πλὴν κακὸς.[1] “Believe if you will,” say the Persians, “that a mountain has removed from one place to another, but if you are told that a man has changed his nature, believe it not!” [Footnote 1: EURIPIDES.] The best of us have but too much cause for making it part of our daily prayer that we fall into no sin! But there is an original pravity which deserves to be so called in the darkest import of the term,—an inborn and incurable disease of the moral being, manifested as soon as it has strength to show itself; and wherever this is perceived in earliest youth, it may too surely be predicted what is to be expected when all controul of discipline is removed. Of those that bring with them such a disposition into the world, it cannot be said that they fall into sin, because it is too manifest that they seek and pursue it as the bent of their nature. No wonder that wild theories have been devised to account for what is so mysterious, so aweful, and yet so incontestable! Zephaniah Holwell, who will always be remembered for his sufferings in the Black Hole, wrote a strange book in which he endeavoured to prove that men were fallen angels, that is, that human bodies are the forms in which fallen angels are condemned to suffer for the sins which they have committed in their former state. Akin to this is the Jewish fancy, held by Josephus, as well as his less liberalized countrymen, that the souls of wicked men deceased, got into the bodies of the living and possessed them; and by this agency they accounted for all diseases. Holwell's theory is no doubt as old as any part of the Oriental systems of philosophy and figments; it is one of the many vain attempts to account for that fallen nature of which every man who is sincere enough to look into his own heart, finds there what may too truly be called an indwelling witness. Something like the Jewish notion was held by John Wesley and Adam